adverbs with two forms

[gudrun]

Hello to everybody,
first of all I'd like to introduce myself: I am Gudrun, e free-lance teacher in adult education working on a self-employed basis actually. I have 60-70 students coming to my little classroom regularly. I live in a little town in East Germany and enjoy my job tremendously although it doesn't make me rich.
My advanced course is practising adverbs at present and I was wondering if any teacher colleague could help me with a "rule" how to distinguish between adverbs which have two forms. Practically everybody is doing quite well but when it comes to the Why? I must admit I am short of a proper theoretical answer.
Well, that's all from me today. Hope to get in touch with one (or two?) of you.

Kind regards,
Gudrun

[MikeNewYork]

Originally Posted by gudrun

Hello to everybody,
first of all I'd like to introduce myself: I am Gudrun, e free-lance teacher in adult education working on a self-employed basis actually. I have 60-70 students coming to my little classroom regularly. I live in a little town in East Germany and enjoy my job tremendously although it doesn't make me rich.
My advanced course is practising adverbs at present and I was wondering if any teacher colleague could help me with a "rule" how to distinguish between adverbs which have two forms. Practically everybody is doing quite well but when it comes to the Why? I must admit I am short of a proper theoretical answer.
Well, that's all from me today. Hope to get in touch with one (or two?) of you.

Kind regards,
Gudrun

There are two groups of these words:

different forms with the same meaning:

loud/loudly
quick/quickly
close/closely

different forms with different meanings:

late/lately
free/feely
near/nearly

It is easier to explain the ones with different meanings; there was a need for a new sense of the word. With the others, there are several possible explanations. The first is that these two forms were derived from a common root, but split off at different times and in different forms in different dialects. That is the sense I get from the etymologies of loud/loudly. Remember that some of these words trace back to old Anglo-Saxon, which was heavily influenced by German and Norse dialects. As they moved from German/Norse to Anglo-Saxon to Old English, there were many opportunities for different forms to arise. In other cases, such as quick/quickly, the use of the adjectival form for an adverb may have arisen from chronic misusage.

Note: These are just a couple of ideas of mine.